


After Dark

by Xairathan



Category: Fate/Grand Order, Fate/stay night & Related Fandoms
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-30
Updated: 2019-09-30
Packaged: 2020-11-08 11:54:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20835029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xairathan/pseuds/Xairathan
Summary: In which Nobunaga is questionably alive, and Okita is definitely dying





	After Dark

**Author's Note:**

> I was reading Haruki Murakami's 'After Dark' and then I got an itch to do an experimental thing and then 3 hours later this came out and what I'm saying is reading is good for you unless you already have a longfic you want to write

I

Past sundown in Kyoto, these are the hours that all sorts of creatures walk the streets: the darker sides of men, the Oni, the Shinsengumi who stop them both. Along the riverbank is the territory of Okita Souji, said to be patrolled not by the First Captain, but by a youkai with that human’s appearance and name, a slayer of both Oni and men who traverses the rooftops unseen. Nonsense— right now, she’s running along the riverbank, trying to stop her quarry from crossing the river and disappearing into the forest. One silent step, two steps infinite, three steps, a sword absolute. The three-stage thrust would rend a head from any creature’s shoulders. Oda Nobunaga smirks at her, half skin and half skull, and leaps in a gout of fire across the rushing water.

II

Oni have habits: Shuten-Doji can be found where the sweetest sake is served, and Oda Nobunaga's mischief rises and wanes with the phases of the moon. Nobunaga sticks to Okita's quarter, unlike the others who are happy to roam Kyoto's various offerings. She's abandoned the matchlocks she was known for in life for the fires that ate her up at Honnouji, twirling around her like playful sparrows as she surveys Okita from the center of the bridge.

"We always seem to find ourselves here," she laughs, the rumble of creaking timbers laid thick in her voice.

"Tell me," Okita replies, "That's all you're doing, because you've got an interest in me, right?"

Nobunaga says instead, "Why don't you ask yourself that?"

III

It’s hard to believe this is truly Nobunaga, when she has no interest in the things that occupied her before. Conquest, reform, those are simply words now, her history. What the people say is that Nobunaga’s body was never found; Nobunaga will one day return and cover all of Japan in her fire. But Nobunaga is content to burn alone in Honnouji, and to run from the bite of Okita’s blade, her laughter the sound of dried grasslands catching flame.

Okita seizes her by the wrist one cloudy night, pins her to the cobblestones lining the road to the Imperial palace. A beam of moonlight traces Nobunaga’s shoulder; she twists under Okita’s stunned gaze, coal for bones and fire for tendons, and flees into the night with sparks lapping at her cape and the shadows of the moon under her steps.

IV

Nobunaga is what Japan makes of her- Demon King and monster, inhuman spirit wearing human flesh.

Okita has chosen her path and walked it well, but she crumbles with the shifting landscape, once steady earth torn out from under her.

Nobunaga’s hand wraps tight around her shoulders, a flickering dry warmth against the humid Kyoto evenings. It’s truly pathetic of Okita that Nobunaga is the one she thinks to seek out, but who else could she turn to in a city of oni and manslayers?

Perhaps Nobunaga knows this. Perhaps that’s why, with exquisite tenderness, she reaches up to wipe freshly fallen blood from Okita’s lips, as gently as if she were handling a cherry blossom.

V

Kyoto and Okita’s eyes are burning. The Shinsengumi had stopped the insurgents at Ikedaya, but no one could hope to predict or stop an oni.

No one knows who started the fire, but Nobunaga is right in front of Okita, and it’s she who bears the brunt of Okita’s anger.

“Why didn’t you stop them?” she shouts with a heaving chest and wild eyes, as the heart of the shogunate burns around her and the heart of Japan trembles threateningly towards Edo.

“I’m sorry, Okita.”

Nobunaga welcomes Okita’s sword into her chest with open arms, letting it sink up to the hilt; holds Okita in her embrace as she sways and begins to tumble to the ground like Kyoto around them, like Honnouji around Nobunaga.

VI

It’s never been hard for Nobunaga to describe what she is, or what she wants. She was the warlord of Owari who wanted to unite Japan, now returned as an instance of _ kotodama _\- but what would she want?

The other oni wanted simple things: sake, women. Nobunaga indulges in those things, but refuses to settle for any; she knows the things she wants will be taken from her, and likely by fire.

So it hurts when, one night in an alleyway, Nobunaga sets her eyes on Okita’s form and feels her chest clenching in response. And it hurts more for her to taste the iron in Okita’s mouth, to have Okita cling to the shoulders of her cape, and yet still be glad that at least it’s not her fire turning Okita’s skin from flush to pale to ashen grey.

VII

When Kyoto settles, its pulse lies firmly in the grasp of the Oni. Hijikata marches to war, but he leaves Okita behind and in charge of those who remain, fighting their own unwinnable battles against the Oni.

Okita goes on patrol on those days where she has enough strength to stand, wandering between the charred bones of the old city and the rising wooden skeletons of the new. Though her hand rests on the hilt of her sword, she prays she won’t find conflict— she could fight, but in this state, she would lose.

She draws near the end of her route at the bridge, and at its base she calls out, “I know you’ve been following me, Nobunaga.”

Nobunaga slinks out from the shadows, sheepish and sly, the front of her coat and her body from her collarbones up to her teeth dyed in vivid, smoking red.

VIII

Nobunaga could have anything she wants- after all, it’s not like the Oni are bound to Kyoto; they just stay because it has the most people, the best booze, the choice women. She could leave any day and march to war, a singular army, unquenchable and unkillable.

She glides through the crack in Okita’s window, all smoke and embers, and settles in a corner out of sight of the moon into her familiar black coat and red cape. Okita is asleep, splayed on her side atop the covers of her futon, her haori still on, a rust stained handkerchief in one clenched fist.

Outside, the streets are eerily silent. No one will dare walk them again for a week, not when a monster of bones and fire chases mischievous Oni and men alike back into their dwellings, said in trembling whispers to be the coming of Okita’s ghost, raging at the city she knows until it’s quiet as a grave.

IX

Okita doesn’t get up anymore, these days.

Nobunaga brings her water, tends to her, opens the window to let the cherry blossoms in, takes Okita’s haori onto her shoulders and sweeps over Kyoto by night like a second firestorm.

Okita slips still further, wasting away, no longer trying to hide the glimmer of disappointment in the waking tremors of her eyes.

For once, Nobunaga is at a loss: how do you heal what has no cure?

(And the second question that, unbeknownst to her, also plagues Okita in her few and fading waking moments-

How do you tell someone who’s already dead that you love them?)

X

The room is a scene of death: black blood on Nobunaga’s coat, now not her own, coughs rather than flames climbing for the ceiling. Nobunaga cradles Okita against her, smooths her hair, rocks her gently. This isn’t dying, she tells her, but passing, a long sleep, and then she’ll wake up again.

Okita doesn’t believe her: Okita hasn’t believed anything that anyone’s told her since the doctors first said she’d stand a chance at making a recovery. She can’t even believe Nobunaga, no matter how much she wants to, no matter what Nobunaga tells her. All she can do is lift her hands to Nobunaga’s cheeks and let Nobunaga kiss her last breaths away from her, taking with them the name of Okita Souji from her now still and chilling lips.

XI

Come sunup in Kyoto, the streets empty of the supernatural and fill with the humanity that gives the city its breath. Along the riverbank are new gas lamps, driving away the darkness and mystery of the night, chasing the Oni away into the forests and the legends they came from.

Resting her arms on the rail of the bridge, her chin atop them, is Nobunaga, watching the disturbances on the surface of the river. If humans were to give voice to the legend of Nobunaga again, it might involve something like waiting at this bridge by day and wandering Kyoto by night.

Right now, those humans are occupied by a different legend, another one of Nobunaga’s, but only hers in the sense that a name would belong to a spring rather than a river.

And one day in that river that winds through Kyoto, a rippling of white against the blue: Nobunaga’s legend brought to life, wading up to her through the rushing water to take her name back from Nobunaga with a kiss, the pressure of her hands on Nobunaga’s cheeks and the hot breath that grazes her mouth saying all the rest for her.

**Author's Note:**

> Also I'm tagging this with Major Character Death because I never get to and I want to amuse myself with the ramifications of it


End file.
